Floating Bridge by Stephanie Minyoung Lee (an excerpt)
Photo courtesy of Bo Carney #StopAsianHate rally, Koreatown, Los Angeles, March 27, 2021.
“Floating Bridge” by Stephanie Minyoung Lee was selected as the winner of this year’s Ray Ventre Memorial Nonfiction Prize by guest judge Natalie Lima, who praises, in part:
Through a mix of personal history and extensive research, “Floating Bridge” blew me away with its ambition and the author’s voice. In this expansive essay about “comfort women”—girls and women from countries across Asia Pacific forced into Japan’s imperial system of military rape during WWII—Lee illustrates how the effects of colonization and violence still linger today, all these years later.…Even though I spent most of the essay learning (about a history I never read about in school), I was transported by the crisp prose and the storytelling the entire time. I can’t wait to read more by this writer.
There are currently 14 known survivors from South Korea and an estimated 100 known survivors across the victimized countries. One victim passed away and survivor Lee Yong-soo turned one year older since Lee completed her essay. Below is the opening section of “Floating Bridge”; read the essay in full in Issue 43, due out this upcoming winter. Congratulations, Stephanie, and thank you for sharing your powerful work and highlighting the urgency for justice and reconciliation with the readers of Passages North.
Floating Bridge
Woo Yun Jae, aged 65.
Some time in 1944 she saw the Japanese put up a floating bridge over the Hung Pok River and cross the bridge to the other side. The soldiers never returned to the military camp.
—Comfort Women an Unfinished Ordeal: Report of a Mission, International Commission of Jurists, 1994.
I never lived as a woman.
I began visiting the statues because of my mother. Most are called the “statue of peace,” although the literal translation in Korean is sonyeosang, or statue of a girl. There are approximately fifty of these statues around the world, including one near where I live in Los Angeles, called the Peace Monument of Glendale. Rendered in bronze, the statue depicts a girl in traditional Korean attire sitting next to an empty chair symbolizing the victims who have passed away or remain unknown.
“We should call them ‘military sex slaves,’ not ‘grandmothers,’” my mother told me once, referring to the victims whom the statues commemorate. We were on our way home from a celebration for the sonyeosang in Glendale.
“They don’t like to be called ‘slaves,’” I pointed out. “But it’s sugarcoating and downplaying the seriousness,” she insisted. We kept disagreeing until she gestured at my semi-sheer blouse and said it was improper for the occasion. This was a rule of modesty that she would have never tested, and she was appalled that it had not crossed my mind.
We were speaking about the “comfort women,” who were scarcely women, many in their twenties and late teens, from more than thirteen countries across the Asia Pacific, trafficked into and detained in Japan’s imperial system of military rape, during the score of years or so until the end of the Second World War. Historians have estimated the number of victims to be anywhere from 60,000 to 400,000, but the total cannot be confirmed. The majority are believed to have died during their captivity. Despite the Japanese government’s ongoing efforts to suppress the facts, a critical mass of historical records has survived, including in U.S. national archives, where footage of “comfort women” was discovered in 2017 and 2020.
At the time, I did not know where this history began, so I started with the places where the victims are remembered. In September 2018, I attended a rally in San Francisco for the “Column of Strength,” a sculptural work portraying three girls from Korea, China, and the Philippines facing a Korean woman in the likeness of Kim Hak-sun, the first survivor to come forward in 1991. This monument was deemed so offensive by Japan’s right-wing faction that, one month later, the Mayor of Osaka wrote a ten-page letter to San Francisco Mayor London Breed and severed a 60-year sister-city relationship.
Six months after that rally, during a visit to Seoul, I visited the House of Sharing, a museum and shelter for the “comfort women” in the suburb of Gwangju. That same week, I watched one of the fifteen remaining Korean survivors, 92-year-old Lee Yong-soo, speak at a “Wednesday demonstration” in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, calling for the Japanese government to unconditionally apologize. This weekly event, reportedly the world’s longest protest on a single theme, was first held in January 1992. Across the street from the embassy is the original sonyeosang installed in 2011, the catalyst for sinking relations between South Korea and Japan, which are said to be at a historic nadir.
Mostly, however, I have stopped speaking about the issue because the people around me seemed not to care. Particularly during these months of lockdown and protests and death and insurrection, I am not sure what space others have for another tragedy, this one nearly eighty years in the past. Growing up in Los Angeles during the 1980s, I often found myself explaining where and what Korea was. Cut to the present, in which both Koreas are mentioned daily in the news for reasons I could have never imagined: COVID-19; Kim Jong-un; BTS, the K-pop boy band; K-pop stans, for regularly flooding the hashtags created by American right-wing extremists.
Among these lows and highs, I wonder who will remember the “comfort women,” often called “grandmothers” in their native tongues, which is said to be a term of respect. To me, however, the appellation seems overly familiar and, moreover, untrue for those who were unable to bear children or held back from family life, believing themselves to be unworthy of normalcy, after having survived things that I suspect the human brain is not wired to understand, although they seem to keep happening all the time, in different iterations around the globe.
What I did not quite prepare for was how this history would infiltrate my association with commonplace things, such as the word “comfort.” The euphemism of “comfort women” is ludicrous, as the late Iris Chang wrote in The Rape of Nanking – so ludicrous that it itself is obscene, because “comfort” is a word reserved for a hearty drink on a wintry day or consoling a small child deprived of a toy. It is no word for the largest known case of modern sex trafficking and slavery by a government, in this case, the former Empire of Japan.
Many of the survivors have rejected the term “comfort women” as a verbal cover-up. “I am very strong about this. We were not ‘comfort women,’ because ‘comfort women’ means something warm and soft. We were ‘Japanese war rape victims,’” said Dutch survivor Jan Ruff O’Herne, in a meeting with a Japanese government official before a public hearing on Japan’s war crimes in Tokyo during December 1992.
Jan Ruff O’Herne would go on to testify around the world, the first white woman to step forward as a victim, knowing that the Japanese government would dismiss the Korean women’s cries. But she, too, passed away in August 2019 without receiving the apology for which they revealed everything in the last years of their lives.
* * *
In January 2019, two months before my visit to Seoul, one of the former “comfort women” named Kim Bok-dong passed away at the age of 92. When she was 14 years old, Japanese soldiers visited her home and told her parents that she was being drafted to work in a garment factory. Instead, she was shipped to a military barracks in Taiwan, where she was dragged into a room, then beaten and raped. Before this happened, the officers debated whether she was too young, but they proceeded anyway.
Afterwards, Kim Bok-dong used the pocket money that her mother had given her to buy a bottle of high proof liquor, which she and a few other girls drank in a suicide attempt. They were revived by Japanese army medics who pumped their stomachs and kept them alive for the torture.
During her eight years in captivity, Kim Bok-dong was taken to Japanese military stations in China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore. She went home in 1945 after American forces arrived. She did not tell her family what had happened until her mother demanded to know why she would not marry.
Kim Bok-dong believed her mother died of heartbreak after learning the truth. For nearly fifty years, she did not tell anyone else until after 1991, when 67-year-old Kim Hak-sun convened a press conference in Seoul. After Kim Hak-sun’s story went worldwide, hundreds of women from South Korea, North Korea, Taiwan, China, the Philippines, Timor Leste, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Malaysia, and Papua New Guinea came forward about what they had endured in “comfort stations” around Japanese military zones throughout the Second World War.
In the wake of these testimonies, the Japanese government continued to deny any role in the “comfort” system, until a Japanese historian named Yoshimi Yoshiaki published six items that he had uncovered in military archives. The documents confirmed that the Imperial Armed Forces of Japan had transported and housed young females throughout the Asia Pacific, beginning in 1932 and until Japan’s surrender to the Allied Powers in 1945.
Yoshimi Yoshiaki’s discovery led to a statement by Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Kōno Yōhei in August 1993, admitting that the military was directly or indirectly “involved” and promising to undertake a thorough study and “forever engraving such issues in our memories through the study and teaching of history.” Neither of those things has come to pass.
I was born a woman, but I never lived as a woman, Kim Bok-dong said in interviews over the years. She was echoing the words of Kim Hak-sun, who had passed away in 1997. I want a formal apology.
Stephanie Minyoung Lee is a Los Angeles native and a film lawyer by day. Her work has appeared in The Common and The Atticus Review. She volunteers for Comfort Women Action for Redress and Education.
Author’s note
Asian names are written in the order of family name, then given name.
The landmark testimony of Kim Hak-sun (alt: Kim Hak-soon) is confirmed in multiple public records, including the website for the now-defunct Asian Women’s Fund (1994-2007).
The quoted testimonies in the excerpt are from the following: for Jan Ruff O’Herne, her autobiography entitled Fifty Years of Silence (ETT Imprint, 1994) and companion documentary directed by Ned Landers; and for Kim Bok-dong, a video interview with Asian Boss (YouTube, 2018) and the BBC obituary dated February 3, 2019. The New York Times also published Kim Bok-dong’s obituary on January 29, 2019.
The sources named in the excerpt are: the 1994 Report by the International Commission of Jurists; and The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang (Basic Books, 1997).
Additional sources include: the 1996 and 1998 Reports of the Special Rapporteurs of the UN Human Rights Commission; Comfort Women by Yoshimi Yoshiaki, translated by Suzanne O’Brien (Columbia University Press, 2000); the 2005 Report by Amnesty International; and the Judgment of the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal for the Trial of Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery, held in Tokyo during December 8-12, 2000.
Thanks to Lighthouse Writers Workshop for an early chance to explore this piece.
